The Emperor of Lies (56 page)

He lies alone on the bits of board in the cellar of the Green House.

He thinks of the time when he worked at the railway goods yard. Everything that was loaded and unloaded. First people were brought in, then they were taken out. Machinery was transported in, then transported out. He thinks about the long freight trains of machine parts that came in by night; about how they had to carry the packing cases in the frigid glare of the searchlights: carry them on their backs to the backs of the waiting lorries. For the heaviest machine parts, they had to construct cradles to be lowered into the wagons by cranes.

And now it was all being transported out of the ghetto again.

How many could there be left in the clean-up commando down in Jakuba Street? Feldman thought there were five hundred at most; women and men held separately.

Were five hundred enough to obliterate the memory of a city of several hundred thousand at its peak?

He thinks about Jankiel’s head lying there in the gravel like a dirty apple, grit and cinders caught up in the spreading blood. Lida is squatting beside the prostrate body, her long, thin arms dangling lifeless between her knees.

Her eyes are fixed on her brother.

Behind her come all the others – Gelibter and Roszek and Szajnwald with the club foot – the shapes of backs and shoulders he so often saw being hoisted in under heavy wooden crates, with small, precise movements. He would have recognised those backs in his dreams if he had seen them again, one by one, bent or crooked or proud, arched, like Jankiel’s backwhen he stood up, stomach out and tailbone in, as though he never tired of showing off what he had hanging there in front. And always smiling. That was why the German guards felt the need to go up and hit him, over and over again. To wipe off that cheeky, freckled smile.

Where are they being taken now? And why isn’t he with them?

Lying there in the darkness of the cellar, he thinks there must be a tipping point somewhere, like when you put weights onto a pair of scales and it suddenly dips.

When the exiled and the dead outnumber the living, it is the dead who start talking instead of the living. There are simply not enough of the living left to be able to maintain a whole reality.

Now he understands. That is where the voices are coming from.

When it is dark and cold and the damp erases all the boundaries, the balance shifts and the sky above is not his sky any longer, but
their
sky. The sky
they
march under on their way from the jail in Czarnieckiego Street all the way out to Marysin, three or five abreast with the policeman a little way out on the left; and the Green House children standing watching from behind the orphanage fence, their hands hanging forgotten in the bars of their cage.

Then
there had not been a sound from the marching column. Now he can suddenly hear all the men singing. All the backs are singing. A voiceless, mighty, rumbling earthsong, growing and expanding inside him. For the song is in him, too. The whole world is booming and shaking with it. He puts his arms up to his ears to shut out the song, but it is no use. When the dead sing, their song has no constraints or fetters, and there is nothing to hide or muffle it with.

When he finally wakes up, only the echo of his scream remains. But it reaches a long way, that echo: far beyond and outside himself, as if he had personally unwittingly drawn a line round all the absent and the dead within a radius of many thousands of kilometres.

So what is left of him, then, of himself? Alone and undelivered among those who are still alive.

He could not recall having ever wept in his whole life. Not even when they took Lida from him had he wept. But now he wept, mainly, perhaps, because there was no one left to weep for.

Winter is coming. It cannot be put off any longer.

The year is like the wheel of an old watermill, tipping on round with its heavy paddles. Sometimes fast, sometimes less so. But never letting itself be stopped.

One morning the long, gentle slope running down from the Green House is brushed with snow. It is the first snow of the year. The wind whisks the snow along with it in thin, white veils, or makes energetic little snow brooms of it that sweep off round the fields, white on green.

He knows he hasn’t got much time if he is to find enough food and fuel to last him all winter.

Feldman has been back up a couple of times.

The lax discipline creeping into the collective in Jakuba Street seems to have got even more casual. The clean-up commando is marched out more and more sporadically. The German officers spend most of their time drinking and playing cards. Food is increasingly hard to get hold of, and it is impossible for Feldman to bring him any quantity of coal or wood without being seen.

Adam has already rummaged around in the old tool shed and found two empty wood sacks. There is not even the tiniest bit of wood left in them, but he does find a little fine, damp sawdust in the bottom. They must have held offcuts from some sawmill; maybe a gift to Feldman on some occasion. He stuffs the two empty wood sacks under his coat and goes out into the drifting snow.

Part of him must have been sure this was just a passing snow shower. The wind seemed to indicate it. Strong and gusty, biting into face and hands.

But the wind dies down and the snow does not stop falling. It comes down more and more heavily. Everything goes quiet. He walks through a pillared hall of thickly falling snow.

It strikes him that his tracks in the snow could give him away, but he is already too far down Marysińska Street for it to be worth turning back.

He must have something to show for his trip. Otherwise he will have expended all this energy for nothing.

He thinks about previous ghetto winters. As soon as the snow fell, it was dirtied and despoiled. By ashes, excrement and rubbish. And the endless paths people forged through it: like narrow black corridors through snow no plough has touched.

Within the curtains of falling snow it is now so white and quiet and still as to be almost unreal. No tracks.

He walks, but it is as if he is not walking at all. He walks as if he is being carried or lifted through the increasingly dense sheets of gently falling snow.

The central coal depot is in Spacerowa Street, just along from the corner with Łagiewnicka, a hundred metres or so from Bałuty Square.

He has not dared to come so close to the heart of the ghetto before.

The coal depot used to be one of the most strictly guarded places in the ghetto. Jewish policemen stood outside the entrance day and night. All along the fence of the compound, too; and at the back, in case anybody tried getting in from the street running parallel, on the north side of the square. The high fence is still there, but the gate is open and there are no guards to be seen.

As he crosses the street, his footsteps leave deep impressions in the snow. He wonders if he should try to smooth over his tracks as he goes, but thinks he would probably just make things worse. The snow is wet now; he can see water pooling in his footprints. It can only be a matter of time until the snow turns to rain, and then it will have been pointless anyway.

He goes further into the compound. Whenever new fuel rations were announced, thousands of people would come and queue up for their five- or ten-kilo allocations of briquettes. He remembers the long, snaking queues that started right inside the little storehouse, a barrack hut almost identical to the one the ghetto administration had at Bałuty Square, and then stretched out into Łagiewnicka Street. Queue-jumping was a popular sport: invoking some imaginary auntie who you said was keeping a place for you up by the counter. Any attempt to butt in like that caused uproar among those behind. People protested loudly and the officers on duty would race over and plunge in, dealing out baton blows to anyone who looked as if they might be hiding a queue-jumper behind their backs.

Now there is nobody here. The compound lies open and empty beneath the snow falling from the sky.

He has no real hopes of finding anything. If there was any coal left here after the last marching column left the ghetto, other hands would have laid claim to it long since.

The door of the warehouse is half open, as well, and can no longer be locked, because (he sees now) the bolt and door handle have been removed. He advances into the gloom, his tentative footsteps echoing dry and cold against the ceiling and bare walls. He can hardly make out anything in the darkness. A bench at the far end, and behind it, a door that must lead into the store itself. This, too, is unlocked, but inside the room it is darker still. He can hardly see his hand in front of his face; moves forward blindly, bumps into a wall, and then a short set of steps is descending under his feet. At the bottom there is a door, and it opens. He is in some kind of small, inner courtyard, perhaps twenty metres square, covered in a thick layer of pristine snow, and enclosed on the far side by a tall wall. This must have been where they kept the briquettes. Over by the wall, which marks the boundary between the coal depot and the blocks of flats beyond, there is a small shed, a tool shed perhaps. He goes over to it and gives the door a half-hearted tug.

There are no tools inside – if that was what he was expecting – but there are wood offcuts piled against the wall. Two decent-sized piles, each about a metre high, and better still, tied up with rope, as if they have just been stacked there to wait for someone like him to come and carry them away. Basic bits of board, different lengths, building timber presumably; most of them broken off at the end. But he is already calculating things in his mind. He should be able to get two or three bundles of wood in each sack; he can carry two or three more under his arm. If the worst comes to the worst, and it’s all too heavy, he can hide a couple of bundles on the way, and come back for them later.

He does not hesitate, but opens the sacks and starts to fill them. He has just started on the second one when he hears something behind him.

It is a thin, delicate, scraping sound. He would not have noticed it, had it not been for the absolute silence in the falling snow.

Steps on a cold stone floor; exactly the same sounds that amplified around him as he went into the storehouse.

Someone is following him, probably after seeing his tracks in the snow.

He stuffs the last bundle of wood into the second sack, drags both sacks back across the snow-covered yard and presses his back to the wall on the other side.

There is a German soldier in the building. He can tell by the harsh, solidly booted, albeit slightly uncertain footsteps across the floor. The metallic jangle of a rifle being unhooked from its strap and sliding slowly down over the belts and buttons of the uniform. Soon he can also hear the soldier’s long, hesitant breaths. Now the soldier sees what Adam himself has long been aware of: the confusion of footprints, crossing each other out in the yard, overlaid with the drag marks left by the two sacks. The soldier takes a few steps out into the yard; it is as if he has to get closer to have any way of understanding what he sees. As he does so, Adam also takes two steps forward, and raises the pistol in both hands.

The young soldier turns round, his face blank and wide open.
A Jew with a pistol.

This is so inconceivable that he has no conception of how to react.

Adam takes a couple more quick steps forward, forces the pistol muzzle into the man’s face and indicates that he should put his rifle down.

Inconceivably enough, the man obeys.

Adam grabs the rifle strap with one hand, gets the butt into his lap and aims the long rifle barrel. Before the man realises what is happening, Adam has put a finger under the trigger and fired.

The shot must have hit the very edge of his neck, for his body is spun half a turn, blood spraying from the side of the head. The German lands on his back in the snow, arms wide as if preparing for an embrace. Adam is there again, with the rifle muzzle pressed to the man’s head, but there is no need. The blood is gushing from the neck wound as if from a tap. The man is not moving, except for his mouth, which is gaping fishlike, as if seeking for words. But nothing is said, or if it is he does not hear, as the echo of the shot continues to reverberate around them, and Adam knows that in the quietness of the ghetto, the report will have been heard everywhere.

He slings the soldier’s rifle over his shoulder by its strap and lugs the two sacks of wood from the inner yard, through the storehouse and out into the compound. Then along Łagiewnicka Street, plodding with his sacks in the middle of the road, an open target. Anybody who sees him will be able to take aim and shoot him.

But nobody sees him – nobody shoots.

The snow has turned to rain, and a faint haze is thickening in the rain, taking on the colour of the twilight that is developing around him. The last thing he sees before turning off Łagiewnicka Street is the big ghetto clock that has always been there.
Ghetto time
: a very peculiar time, different from all the other times in the world. Now, the hands are pointing to 4.40 on the pale clock face.

Twenty to five. Snow turns to rain. A Jew has just killed a German.

A few blocks further on:

He has carried on up Młynarska Street, keeping as far to the right as he can, to the side of the street in the shelter of the trees. That is when it strikes him that the most stupid thing he could do right now is to go back to the Green House. It is obvious the Germans will look there first. And if they start questioning the clean-up commando, Feldman may very well be forced to tell them about the Green House and the nursery.

On the other side of the road: a long row of standard blocks of flats. There is nothing left of the snowfall but light rain. The tracks he has left will be obliterated within an hour at most. He goes into one of the dark stairway entrances, dragging the wood sacks after him. He goes up as far as he can. First floor, second floor.

The door of a flat: he shoves it open with his shoulder.

Two rooms, wallpaper drooping, peeling off in long lengths from the damp-stained walls; a window looking out on the street; a sooty stove.

He lies down on his back on the ice-cold bed, tries to make himself breathe more calmly.

Right across the middle of the ceiling an intricate pattern of cracks as the plaster has come away in the damp.

So he has wood – two sackfuls. He could even have got a fire going if he had had anything to light it with, and were it not for the fact that they would instantly discover him if he did.

Just like the pistol, not to mention the rifle, the wood, too, is now completely useless.